Chrome and Firefox are about to get a lot faster thanks to Google's new data compression algorithm

Google Chrome is about to get a lot faster, all thanks to a new algorithm called Brotli. Revealed by Google in September last year, the data compression algorithm is said to be 20 to 26 percent more efficient than Zopfli, the existing engine that was launched just over three years ago.

It now looks as if Brotli, which Google is calling a “whole new data format,” will arrive on Chrome quite soon, according to a post by Google's web performance engineer Ilya Grigorik. No word yet on an exact date when this will happen, but it’s expected to be here in the next few weeks.

While Brotli compresses HTML, JavaScript and CSS to allow for "better space utilization and faster page loads,” the biggest area of improvement in compression is said to be HTML, which the new code can squeeze down by 25%.

Google says users should expect to see a noticeable increase in load times once the next version of Chrome is released. The company added that mobile users will also benefit from "lower data transfer fees and reduced battery use," which should help those who eat up their data allowance all too quickly.

Google also hopes that other browsers will eventually support Brotli. It looks as if Firefox will be the first non-Chrome browser to use the algorithm, as it has said it will adopt Brotli in a future update.

When Brotli was first announced, Google found itself unexpectedly caught up in a gender controversy for its plans to use a ‘.bro’ file extension, which some people, quite strangely, said came across as misogynistic and unprofessional. Google eventually changed the extension to ‘.br,’ and put out a statement that read: "there will be no '.bro' in Brotli.”